One clear stumbling block for IT innovation in larger companies is the need to communicate that vision from the technology executive level to wider management. This is particularly difficult in verticals where innovation is not a major element of the culture on any level. Gartner analyst Dale Hagemeyer points to the consumer goods sector as a prime example.
"For more than 20 years, consumer goods manufacturers have introduced new products around an 'efficiency model' that doesn't disrupt engineering, plant production and ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems," Hagemeyer wrote in a recent Gartner commentary paper. "What has emerged is a series of 'flanker products' in new flavours, colours, and features with minimal breakthrough innovation."
That lack of innovation has been in part driven by necessity. "Consumer goods manufacturers have traditionally been able to grow at about the same rate as the population because there is only so much wallet share or 'stomach share'. Going forward, innovation will be necessary for company survival." The same could be said of many other sectors (look at the telecommunications market, for instance, where the packaging and pricing of services is now far more important than basic quality, which is taken for granted).
How can the IT department contribute to a new process of growth and eliminate the stagnation? One critical strategy is to embrace the notion of innovation (and stop running down the corridor).
"To understand IT's ability to deliver business value to the enterprise, CEOs should focus on what Forrester describes as innovation capacity: the potential for the IT function to support new products, processes, and opportunities," write Forrester analysts Laurie Orlov and Andrew Bartels. "Successful companies will grow their IT innovation capacity by focusing on how IT is sponsored, operated, and governed."
It's important to recognise that not every project can be a guaranteed success. "All new business growth strategies are risky; no one knows if they are going to work," Gartner points out. "The trick is to find the one world-beating idea among dozens of duds. The only way to do this is to test ideas using strategic experiments." Identifying where innovation can be a useful contribution and where it will just lead to unexpected complexity is also an important step.
One useful approach is often found in the deployment of the most conventional IT projects: working one department or sector at a time.
When rolling out a speech recognition platform, the Australian Taxation Office deliberately focused on individual projects rather than trying to speech-enable everything in site.
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